Three poems by Victoria Lynne McCoy

When an elephant comes across abandoned
skeletons, she will nudge the scattered bones
and tusks, build a grave of branches,
stay silent
for days. She will know her way back to them.
When the needle first drilled into the skin taut
across my rib cage and tender breast tissue, then
deeper, the tattoo artist told me I was a bleeder.
You,
a few days dead as grief seeped from me in the shape
of your name. A burial ground of black ink
and dead skin down the side of my body.
When a spotted dolphin’s companion dies
it swims around for days with its eyes refusing to open
and years ago scientists in Tanzania saw a chimpanzee
die of a broken heart
and sometimes I can’t help
but believe some god plucks loved ones
from our hands like dandelions. Maybe elephants
return to the gravesite because they cannot forget
how to get there. For weeks I carried around a teddy bear,
your picture
hung from its neck by a blue shoelace.
*

Self-Portrait in Unfinished Letters

Dear —
The gulf is bleeding black
again.
They say they’ll fix it. They say Claude Chabrol is dead
for the first time
today—September 12th and church bells
through the courtyard window.
I meant to see more of his films
while he was alive. Barreling down Pacific Coast Highway,
what was that song? Do you remember
what Allison sounds like sitting shotgun?
+
Dear —
I quit vegetarianism last month.
Remember when the teacher said,
I’m too old to protest?
The largest picture on the front page
of the paper is a man crossing Bryant Park
with a mannequin
underarm. They said
they’d fix it. A city of moths
to the tent-white sheen of celebrity.
I try to leave her
out of this one: Allison, a choir of whispers in the dark.
+
Dear —
They decided not to burn the Quran yesterday.
You’ve always liked it better when there’s a they in the story.
I’ve lost faith in my own
impact.
The Nile is drowning in one hundred tons
of gasoline and Allison is dead
for the one thousand seven hundred seventeenth time
when I wake. There’s a fire
under the earth they can’t fix.
+
Dear —
La fille cupée en deux in a near-empty theater,
my appendages overflowing
with the ghost of almost.
I’ve forgotten her face for the third time today.
A sunken-in man on the subway plays a song
about a city built entirely of instruments
that make no sound.
I’ll go anywhere
the sirens can’t find me.

*

Allison

I was sure I'd die like her
as I watched the world upturn.
My scream—
a single, almost indistinguishable word—
sluicing through the windshield's cracks.
The sky for a moment at my feet
and then just sky again.
The car roof bowed beneath the tree.
Two arms in the morning light
tore me from the wreckage
of splintered glass, branches,
her name, her name, her name.
I was sure I'd die like her that day
and what I remember most clearly
as the highway kaleidoscoped before me
was screaming her name, begging
not to live, but to find her
in the after, waiting.